The complaint, and the consolation; or, night thoughts, by Edward Young, LL.D. fatis contraria fata rependens. Virg

Large Quarto (16 3/16" x 12 3/8", 410mm x 315mm): 54 leaves, pp. i-iii (title, blank, advertisement) iv-viii, [2] (Night the first, on life, death and mortality, blank) 1-16 17-18 (Night the second on time, death and friendship, blank) 19-42 43-44 (Night the third, Narcissa, blank) 45-63 64-66 (blank, The Christian triumph, blank) 67-95 [3] (blank, 2pp. explanation of the engravings). With 4 engraved subtitle-pages and 39 engravings bordering the text. Disbound. Presented in a custom chemise within a portfolio of quarter mottled calf over grey card (16 7/8" x 13 ¼", 428mm x 336mm). On the spine, "Young’s / night / thoughts / Blake" gilt to a black morocco lettering piece. Date gilt to the heel. Pinholes and facsimile repairs along the left margin throughout. Occasional pale foxing, soiling to the extremities, and cockling. Repaired horizontal tear from the fore-margin to leaf 10. Repaired tear to the lower fore-corner of leaf 35. Horizontal tear extending from fore-edge of leaf 49. Dampstain to the upper edge of pp. 51 Watermark of J. Whatman to leaf 35 and 48. Leaf of "Explanation of the engravings" inlaid. In 1797, the bookseller Richard Edwards published the first installment of his new edition of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts. A poem in nine parts, the work had already seen many iterations since its initial release between 1742 and 1745. Edwards promoted his unique edition with a titillating prospectus, describing it as "part the first of a splendid edition of this favourite work, elegantly printed, and illustrated with forty very spirited engravings from original drawings by BLAKE." Described as "the most grandiose engraving project of Blake's lifetime" (Bentley & Nurmi, p. 4), the impression was instantly scarce. William Blake (1757-1827) spent nearly two years illustrating the complete Night Thoughts; creating a watercolor design in the margins of every page, amounting to 537 illustrations in total. This was the largest commercial endeavor for which Blake was ever employed. Edwards began the project by having the pages from the first and second editions of the poem glued into windows cut into large leaves of Whatman wove paper. These text pages were positioned slightly off-center to create a lower margin greater than the upper and an outer margin greater than the inner (Bentley notes that the paper was "only marginally larger than the copperplate, and even in untrimmed copies, parts of the platemarks may not appear"). Blake was paid the paltry sum of twenty guineas for his watercolors, presumably because he expected to receive a great deal more for engraving them. Of 537, only 43 were engraved for the first run of the Edwards edition, which spanned four "Nights" of the poem. Despite much anticipation, the project was a complete commercial failure, and no further volumes were released. The flop of the project may have been one of the reasons why Blake decided, in 1800, to move from London to the village of Felpham on the Sussex coast and place himself under the patronage of William Hayley. Today, the vast majority of Blake’s Night Thoughts illustrations remain unpublished. The cost of the project, which involved the separate printing of the text and the plates, was evidently too great, and the illustrations were perhaps too lewd for contemporary tastes (Pilkington notes that the work’s only impression on the public was to startle the pious with unexpectedly "naked groups"). Additionally, Young’s words and Blake’s pictures were often in tension with one another. The generality of Young's diction gave Blake considerable freedom in illustrating it, and Blake’s ideological supplementals become apparent even with a cursory glance. When Young wrote Night Thoughts in the middle of the XVIIIc, he considered that he was offering "plain truths" with which his readers would agree — that reason is man's dominant faculty and rigid moral laws provide punishment for sin. When Blake illustrated the poem fifty years later, it was precise. …